by Mel Keegan
“Curtis? Curt, you okay?”
“No.” Marin took a breath, audible over the comm. “Christ. We’re dead, Neil. We’re gone. We just dropped her into a bloody black hole.”
Both tanks cracked open with a hiss of equalizing pressures, and the canopies lifted. Travers sat up, still swallowing on the nausea. The simulator was open, letting in a spill of dimmed hangar lights, but even so his eyes protested as he lifted the veeree visor, took off the headset.
“You still with us?” Rabelais’s voice.
“We hung it up,” Travers croaked.
“I’m guessing everybody does the first time,” Rabelais told him. “Damn, you almost had it. For a minute there, I thought you were going to do it! And nobody should be able to do it, first time out.”
“Mick Vidal did.” Marin was sitting. He lifted off the veeree set and massaged his temples. “And he didn’t do it in simulation. He took the Orpheus into transspace, and he … he did it, for real. First time. No second chances.”
“Yeah,” Queneau said, amused, “but he’s Mick Vidal. That’s what his brain is wired for. You, me – we gotta learn this.”
“You guys are going to be good.” Rabelais was serious. “I was impressed. The first time I tried to fly this, with Jo, we were toast in about two minutes flat.”
“What time did we make?” Marin rolled up to his knees, held his head in both hands for a moment and then got his feet under him. As he stepped down out of the crate his balance was off, and Rabelais caught him before he could stumble.
“Total elapsed sim time, 32 minutes, 14 seconds,” Rabelais read off a handy. “I told you, you did good. You were within striking distance of the Taurus beacon.”
“Half an hour? That can’t be right. It felt more like ten minutes.” Travers lifted himself out, felt the real world slip off kilter and slither sideways. He grabbed for the folded-up gullwing of the pilot’s tank to steady himself and pulled several breaths to the bottom of his lungs. “God, I feel …”
“Bad,” Marin finished.
Every muscle was shaking and Travers discovered himself drenched in sweat. His hair and clothes were sodden, and when he blinked at Marin he saw the same.
“I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. And I need a shower,” Marin said thickly. He was still holding his head as if it throbbed, and his eyelids were heavy. They looked puffy. “Sorry … I haven’t had my balance screw up this way since I was a rookie in flight school.”
Rabelais was unsurprised. “You’re not going to believe this right now, but you guys were impressive. I really thought you were going to do it – next time, you will.”
“Next time?” Travers echoed. At this moment he could not imagine going back into the sim.
“Or the time after,” Queneau said easily. “It gets easier. Trust me.”
He looked at her out of eyes that still refused to focus properly. “You’ve made this work?”
“Yeah.” She frowned at the simulator she had helped to design. “I’ve made it work, navigating with Mick, and flying with Ernst. Perlman and Fargo are coming in here tomorrow to take it for a spin, and then Roark and Asako later.”
With an effort Travers pushed himself away from the pilot’s tank and stepped down onto the deck. “I guess we’ll be back,” he said hoarsely.
“Like she said, it does get easier,” Rabelais told him, “but only if you keep doing it. You’ve got a lot of potential.”
“Thanks.” Marin pulled his spine straight, worked his neck around. He picked up his jacket. “We’ll catch up with you later.”
They were out the hangar then, and Travers pushed one foot in front of the other until the door slid over on their quarters. He was stripping out of the wet, disgusting clothes as he made his way into the bathroom, and the cascade of scalding water was sheer relief. Marin leaned against the tiles with him, letting it unclench his muscles while it reddened his skin.
“Mick’s been doing this?” Travers demanded. “In his condition?”
“Like Queneau said, his brain’s wired for it.” Marin massaged his scalp with all ten fingertips and shook out his wet hair. “He gets this look in his eyes, like he wants to go back there.”
The memories were haunting, and despite the hot water Travers shivered. “I think I caught one glimpse of what he sees, or feels. It was power. Freedom. For a minute there, I thought I could get hooked on it. Like veeree addiction, I suppose – the game addiction you were supposed to have, the first time we did business on the Kiev. I felt … more than just freedom.”
“With sudden death everywhere you turn,” Marin added. “There’s quite a few games a little like this – they’re banned, with good reason.”
Travers remembered the handful of contraband datacubes Marin had procured from the blackmarketeer, Vance Botero, a lifetime ago. On that assignment Marin had played the part of a pilot so addicted to his own adrenaline, the rush of excitement, he could no longer handle the comedown back to reality.
“You reckon Mick’s addicted?” Travers wondered. “I know it’s not a game, but the thrill is the same. You remember that idiot, Frank Berglun?”
“Oh, I remember.” Marin turned to let the water scald his back. “And it’s quite possible Mick’s got himself a little bit hooked. Turn around.” He had swiped up a bottle of liquid soap, and as Travers turned he felt strong hands begin to knead him from shoulders to buttocks. “How the hell did you manage the navigation?”
“It’s in your fingers,” Travers said vaguely. “You have to do it, you can’t explain it. I don’t like my chances of handling the piloting. I was never a fighter jockey, and nothing about this is like flying gunships.”
“You won’t know till you try.” Marin let the water sluice away the froth of suds and absently soaped his own chest and belly. “Damnit, Neil – I’m just not used to screwing up! At least I didn’t throw up.”
A chuckle rumbled in Travers’s chest. “I came close a few times. You all right, now? Could you handle dinner?”
“I think so.” Marin hit the tap to kill the water and flood the shower stall with a hurricane of hot air.
A tall glass of water, and Travers began to feel more like a living human being. He caught Marin by the hips as Curtis was rummaging through the closet, and held him tightly. Marin turned into his arms, and his lips traced a path from Travers’s left ear to his mouth. The kiss was fleeting; the next was not. If Travers had not been so hungry, he might have hit the bed and invited Curtis to do unspeakable things to him, but his belly was insistent.
“Later,” Marin promised, as if he had read Travers’s thoughts.
“Later?”
“You can do me,” Marin decided. “I have a hankering to be done. Comprehensively, if you can manage it.”
“Oh, I imagine I’ll find a way to cope.” Travers’s arms went around him, held him to a kiss that fetched a faint iron tang of blood. He pressed Marin back against the bulkhead, left a transient bite brand on the base of his neck, low enough for his collar to cover it. His hands spanned the lean, hard planes of Marin’s chest, and he gave a bass growl as Curtis’s hands clenched into his buttocks.
“Comprehensively,” Marin repeated, eyes closed, head tipped back against the wall. “You can do me till I can’t remember my own name or what the hell we’re in this system for. Chase the thinking out of my brain for a while.” The hazel eyes opened to luminous slits and his lips quirked. “You have your assignment.”
“Assignment?” Travers echoed. He retrieved one hand and sketched a salute. “Yessir, Colonel, sir.”
“I’ll give you yessir,” Marin grumbled good naturedly, and gave him a push.
For a moment Travers resisted, refusing to be pushed. He knew full well, Marin could use any one of twenty Aramshem techniques and have him flat on the bed, overpowered, almost at whim. But Curtis was not in that kind of mood, and relaxed back into the wall with a sultry look. “I thought you were hungry.”
“I am.” Travers’s hands explored what they
could reach, making Marin purr like a big cat. “Or did you mean for food?”
Marin indulged himself in a rumbling laugh. “Both, I suppose. Dinner? Then – mark it up on your busy schedule, Colonel. You and me. Back here … with the bottle of green goo you found in Supply.”
“The stuff that smells like fresh mint and makes your nerve endings crackle?” It was Travers’s turn to laugh. “I thought you didn’t like it.”
“Not every time.” Marin stretched easily. “It’s too intense for every time, but I feel like it tonight. It might just stop me thinking, you know?” He looked up at Travers from beneath lowered lids. “Objections?”
“From me?” Travers relented and stepped back. “You’re joking, right?” Marin gave him a dark look over one shoulder as he turned to inspect the closet. “Dinner,” Travers concluded.
“And a lot of it.” Marin leaned back, flicked his mouth with a last kiss and began to rummage for fresh clothes.
The crew lounge was quiet. The Ops room was still busy and the aromas of coffee and food issued from the ’chef there. Vaurien, Jazinsky, Ingersol, Hubler and Rodman, and to Travers’s surprise, Tonio Teniko himself were still wrangling the cleanup after the altercation at Rashid. The flatscreens in the lounge streamed constantly with mission data, and as Travers ate he took in the bottom line numbers.
Six people had been killed; the last died of his injuries only minutes before and had been tanked while the brain was still viable, pending cloned organs. Fifteen more were injured, two of them so severely, they were also in cryogen. Seven officers were in custody, not including the pair from the Kiev’s command corps who had been shipped out under Quarantine conditions. Of the original ten blockade ships, only three were viable now, with sublight and Weimann capability restored after comprehensive diagnostics and a careful reboot. Three ships were rated unsalvageable and drones would break them up for their components and scrap materials. Two vessels had already been delivered to the docks over the pole of Omaru for swift repairs. Five more were parked on station keeping, waiting for service.
The general estimate was a three-week cleanup procedure, and Richard Vaurien was satisfied enough with this to sign off on the assignment. The report was already in Harrison Shapiro’s hands, and the greater issue, now, was the disposition of the crew.
Over nine hundred men and women were in the simulation tank in the belly of the Sark, still under the surveillance of the flight of gundrones Travers has brought online, but almost all of them had voluntarily accepted security chipping. The few who refused identified themselves as Confederate loyalists, and a troop transport was on standby to ferry them to a facility on Omaru before midnight, Wastrel time.
The food and wine were excellent but Travers tasted little of either. He watched Marin for the pleasure of just looking at him, noticing the little things, like the way his hair curled as it dried, and the green highlights raised in the hazel eyes by the muted glowbots docked to the ceiling. Marin divided his attention between his plate, his partner and the screen, and Travers had lost the thread of the data when he said,
“There’s a plane on approach.”
“Coming up to the Wastrel?” Travers twisted to look back at the screen. He saw an IFF which was unfamiliar, though Etienne had already let it through without posting any security alert. “Now, where did she come from … and who the hell is it?”
“It has to be a classified IFF,” Marin mused. “I guess it was on the old need to know basis, and we didn’t need to know. Look at the vector.”
The spaceplane had not come up from Omaru. The flightplan listed Ceduna as the point of departure – the small, rocky world in the outer system, bearing a century-old mining installation which had been shut down since Goldman-Pataki found richer lodes elsewhere. All Travers knew about Ceduna was that it was frozen, lifeless, with a wispy atmosphere of gases liberated from its rocks and left over from at least one cometary impact, all but the heaviest of which had bled away to space a billion years before.
“What the hell would anybody be doing out there?” he wondered, “especially in a plane this size.”
The incoming craft was in the same class as the Capricorn, unsuitable for long flights or extended layovers.
“There was plenty happening on Ceduna before the blockade,” Marin mused. “I read the file when Shapiro assigned us here the first time. Goldman-Pataki spent about eighty years ripping the planet to shreds. They gouged out vast undergrounds – a lot of Omaru’s toxic industry was installed there, to keep the rot out of the homeworld itself. Mind you, Fleet hasn’t kept up surveillance on it since the blockade was set up. They just chased the human crew the hell out, deactivated the drones, shut down the AI and left Ceduna to rot. And even if Fleet should have been watching it …” He gestured at the screen, where docking information was displayed now. “If this plane’s classified, and if she’s come straight to the Wastrel, Rusch would have called off the dogs, let her hide there.”
“So she could have been hiding there for some time,” Travers mused.
He broke off as Vaurien stepped out of the Ops room, headed aft to the service elevators. Richard paused for a moment and looked into the crew lounge. “You might want to come along.”
“Someone we know?” Marin drained the last of his Riesling and got moving.
“We all do.” Vaurien smiled wryly. “We’re coming full circle, Curtis. It’s been a long haul.”
Jazinsky appeared behind him, dragging a pick-style comb through the mass of white-blonde hair. She had changed, showered; the hair was still damp and she was in pale denims and a tunic of Resalq designs, burgundy, green, gold.
“You know who’s just come aboard,” Travers guessed as he pushed up to his feet.
“Oh, yeah.” Jazinsky shoved the comb into her hip pocket. “Endgame, Neil. This whole thing started when Bobby Liang’s kid was killed. Murdered. What was the name of that ratshit sergeant?”
“Neville.” Even now Travers could not speak the man’s name without a rush of distaste. “Roy Neville.”
“He’s the one.” Jazinsky drew her fingers through her hair, fanning it, encouraging it to dry. “You smuggled the data off the Intrepid, brought it to us. We took it to Chandra Liang, he went right to Dendra Shemiji. Curtis took the assignment – which, incidentally, Mark would have told him to leave alone! Good thing for us all he didn’t confer with Mark.”
The elevator had opened as she spoke, and was going down and aft to the hangar as she fell silent. “We should have known,” Vaurien said tersely. “Mark’s ships were out there for years. The Aenestra surveyed as far as Orion 359, hunting for traces of Zunshu activity beyond Hellgate – we should have known, if he hired time on independent computers, Fleet would catch up with us.”
“Not necessarily,” Jazinsky argued. “Research institutes do it all the time – and the overload of data, the Resalq encryption, weren’t the only things that brought Harrison to Saraine, Mark’s house, that day.” She gave Marin an amused look. “You had no way of knowing the access codes you used to set up the hit on Neville came from one of Sondra Deuel’s spies, but the flags went up instantly in Harrison’s office, soon as you used them to log in.” She snapped her fingers. “The truth is, he had us right there even before you went aboard the Intrepid. And speaking of Sond and Bobby, you know they’re handfasting?”
“Again?” Vaurien did not look surprised. “They handfasted before. They were married for fifteen years.”
“And estranged, and divorced, and reunited by the death of their kid, and now they’re thick as thieves.” She nodded slowly. “I like it.”
Vaurien shot a sidelong glance at her as the lift stopped and Travers and Marin stepped out. “Was that a broad hint?”
“You mean, did I just propose to you?” Jazinsky laughed, a deep sound of genuine humor. “God knows, Richard. We’ve been partners a long, long time. Wouldn’t make any difference, would it, if we handfasted.”
“It might,” Vaurien said darkly as he
followed Travers and Marin, “get Teniko off my case. Permanently.”
“He’s bugging you?” Travers was surprised. “You came down on him like a load of bricks, and I haven’t seen you say two words to him since you let him come back aboard after Riga.”
“That’s because I haven’t said two words.” Vaurien had come to rest at the hangar’s inner lock, where the monitor showed pressure and temperature levels. The incoming ship was shutting down engines and the hangar had just begun to cycle. “But he … watches me.”
“I’ve watched him watching,” Marin said without amusement. “He eats you alive with his eyes. And it bugs you. If it wouldn’t make any difference if you and Barb didn’t handfast, it wouldn’t make any difference if you did.”
For just a moment Vaurien frowned at Travers, and Neil asked softly, “What, you need my blessing? What for? You and me … it was a lifetime ago, Richard. We don’t even live in that same universe now.”
Vaurien’s brows rose and he exhaled a long sigh. “All very true.” He favored Marin with a rueful smile and then slid one arm around Jazinsky, though he spoke to Travers. “We filed the documentation for the full, legal business partnership. Anything happens to me on the Lai’a expedition, Barb inherits the lot. The ships, everything.”
“Don’t even say it,” Jazinsky growled.
“Superstitious?” Vaurien leaned back to look at her.
“Not especially. But I’m not in the habit of taking risks.” She reached up, splayed one hand over the red hair which was bound in its customary tail, but before she could speak again the green bars winked on in the monitor and the hangar door slid open.
The air was chill, breezy, sharp with the acid chemistry of hot engines. The ship was one of the big Marshalls, Travers did not know the model. The ramp was extended, and as he walked out across the ringing black steel deck the passengers headed down. Marin murmured as he recognized them, and General Kristyn Bauer waved in greeting.
A pace behind was her husband, Mike Quinn, and two tall, leggy blond youths lagged back, hesitant. They were half Pakrani, taller than Bauer already, though Travers guessed they would be no more the mid-teens, and Kris Bauer was a tall woman. They looked much more like Quinn, and if Travers was any judge they would grow up good-looking. Bauer was in dress grays, elegantly coiffured, though the rest of the family were in sweats and teeshirts; and the look on Quinn’s handsome face was far from approving.
